From the archive! Drupal 9: Creating A Category Menu Using Derivers
How to set up a menu deriver and then using that deriver to inject custom elements into the menu.
Derivers can be used with menus, local tasks, action links, contextual links, migrations, help topics, and a number of plugin types.
Tip: Add the words "deriver" and "derivers" to your spell checker ;)
https://www.hashbangcode.com/article/drupal-9-creating-category-menu-using-derivers
Drupal 9: Creating A Category Menu Using Derivers
Derivers in Drupal are one of the ways in which you can inform Drupal about the presence of plugin types. This allows you to generate multiple custom types of a plugin so that it can be represented as multiple different plugins within the system. Perhaps the most useful deriver example I have seen is the menu deriver. This allows us to use the Drupal plugin architecture to generate custom menu links.